+1. I can't speak to Windows but I suspect it's similar: if you're running a well-implemented native app (ex. Pixelmator) the responsiveness is entirely there and in fact significantly better than it was in the 90s. Even fairly graphically heavy apps have no issues resizing and otherwise being real-time interactive.

I would hazard that the vast majority of "jank" you see in desktop apps today is due to cross-platform code. A large portion of this is webviews (ex. Slack), but some of it is also poorly-implemented shims between the platform's native APIs and shoehorning that into some cross-platform library (ex. Photoshop).

I recently used a legacy win32 app at work, on a windows 10 laptop. It looked old, even though the buttons etc got styled the win10 way. Since the app had some issues, I wanted to rule out a compatibility problem with modern Windows, and ran the app in a windows XP VM on the same laptop. Unfortunately the same issues arose, but I was really surprised by how snappy the app felt. Everything was just immediate, sub-windows popped up instantly. Sure, the machine was an order of magnitude faster than the typical XP machine back in the day, so it's not an apples to apples comparison, but still it was one of these revelations that we just seem to be taking one step forwards and at least one step back every time we improve something.

Even if you take a step above win32 and use a framework like GTK or QT, you'll find that sort of responsiveness.

Modern macOS is a significant counterexample to that claim. Most of it is janky. Zooming and dezooming the Finder is not something a 2.5 years old MacBook Air (€1200) can keep up with smoothly, for instance. Opening a Save dialog takes over 3 seconds, and expanding/collapsing the file explorer in it is comically janky.

None of this sounds right based on my experience.

Wondering which model you have? Is it fanless? I’ve never used until o got my 2022 m2 air. It’s the best computer I’ve ever used.

Before that, 10 years of Mac Pro, and they’ve all been old (2010 models) and fast.

MacBook Air early 2020 base model.

The 2010 Mac Pro doesn’t run macOS 11+, that might be its X factor.

Is that a fanless intel machine?

The Mac Pro can run newer os with the help of open core. I can do many things with it like run Mac osX 10.6 using my modern amd rx570.

I can also run macos 12+ which I do. It runs great!

That's simply not true. A 2019 MacBook Air has no trouble with any of these things. If you're having trouble with these, something is seriously wrong with your computer.

Proof: https://dieulot.fr/~temp/Screen%20Recording%202022-12-05%20a...

It’s more pronounced while recording but that’s the idea.

Ah, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Now that I understand, I'm less surprised. For some reason I was thinking File I/O.

The Early 2020 MacBook Air is a joke from a CPU/Graphics perspective - even compared to other Intel Macs.

I still think something's wrong with your computer, as I have worked with multiple of that model and they weren't nearly this bad (even accounting for screen recording) - perhaps your cooling is worse?

Not by any means a solution to all Electron problems, but Tauri[0] is promising.

0 - https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri

We're looking seriously at Tauri for a new application. It seems good, although we're very early days.

yep, we're using too. Very happy so far.

That's great to hear.

Is this any better in performance? Looks like rust bolted to a system webview (chromium in the case of Windows) instead of electron (chromium bolted to v8)

Yup that’s the answer, and cyber security, we had to add thousand of code lines in order to circumvent login properties and such, in order to make software more secure (and less private)

Just this morning I finally bought a license for Sublime Text.

It's just so much faster than any other GUI-based editor.

VS Code works great in my experience.

Thankfully to having multi-process architecture with enough of those services written in a mix of C#, Rust and C++.

Vast majority of the codebase is Typescript: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/main/src. Only thing I could find written in Rust was the CLI.

Sure, under the hood Electron is powered by Chromium V8 (which also powers Node.js), which is written in C++. But that is just the basic packages and services available to all Electron desktop and Node.js apps.

See ripgrep, and Microsoft plugins that have to be additionally installed, depending on the workloads.

We'll I've spent years on notepad++ and I will have to disagree (ofc VSC can be almost like full IDE but I don't have a lot of plug-ins)